"Brought from the Palenques": Race, Subjecthood, and Warfare in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean

abstract:This article analyzes the intersection of racial status and subjecthood following the mid-seventeenth-century English invasion of Spanish Jamaica by focusing on the experiences of a group of Spanish Jamaican captives of African descent from the Porus region. By tracing the violent transformation of the Porus captives from individuals with claims to Spanish subjecthood into "slaves," this article shows that the captives did not disappear or die out as historians have assumed; rather, they were forcibly removed. Bridging historiographic and archival divides reveals the alchemy of their erasure both at the time and in modern historical practice. In the end, the forced transportation of the Porus captives from Jamaica underscores the vulnerability of people of African descent in a Caribbean world shaped, if not yet by sugar and slavery, then certainly by enslavement and warfare.